Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, this proposal is very important both to the opponents and proponents. I am still unable to hear because of the noise in the Senate.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BUMPERS. Could the Senator say about how long he anticipates speaking on his amendment?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent I be permitted to proceed for 5 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me say first of all that in the Senate in 1981 there were only 11 votes cast against the proposal to cut taxes and increase defense spending to balance the budget--11 Senators. President Reagan's popularity was unbelievable, and there was a herd instinct that swept across this body. It was absolutely unstoppable. And in 1994 when we were going to balance the budget the deficit was up to $200 billion. I hate to say this. But, in my opinion, Mr. President, 18 people who voted ``no'' today will be more than justly and aptly vindicated when the year 2002 rolls around and we will not have a balanced budget or anything even close to it. I am chagrined and dismayed that today we are looking at a $67 billion deficit on October 1, and next year, by our own admission and our own actions, the deficit will go to $94 billion --almost $30 billion higher than it is in 1997. To me that is shameful and unforgivable. The American people have demanded a balanced budget as long as anybody can remember, and today we just forsook the opportunity to meet that nonnegotiable demand of the American people which they have laid on us for years. Mr. President, I forsook offering an amendment that I felt very strongly about this afternoon. I did it to accommodate our own majority leader who had a plane to catch, and there were a lot of other Senators. I had no disillusions about whether my amendment would pass or not. But I wanted to debate it for 1 minute, and I am perhaps better off taking 5 minutes now to say to whoever may be watching and the Members of this body, ask yourself this question. It goes right to the heart of my amendment. Do you think the Nation is better off providing a $135 billion tax cut, over 50 percent of which goes to the wealthiest 5 percent of the people in America? Do you think we are better off doing that, or do you think we would be better off providing a college education for the 5 million youngsters whom the New York Times says over the next few years will be excluded from a college education because of skyrocketing costs? I speak from experience. I spent 3 years in the Marine Corps in World War II. I came home where there was a compassionate, caring, understanding Government which provided the GI bill to my brother and me. I wouldn't be standing on the floor of the Senate today as a U.S. Senator if it had not been for that help from the U.S. Government. Some people think the Government has no obligation to help anybody. What I am saying is if I had my first choice it would be to put the $135 billion in savings on the deficit, and balance the budget by the year 2000, and no later than 2001. But if we are not going to do that, if we are going to take the $115 billion we cut out of Medicare and spend it on something, I say spend it on college education for youngsters who cannot go to college otherwise. Mr. President, the greatness of this country has occurred when Members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives had strong convictions about what we need to do as a matter of social, educational, and cultural policy--the GI bill, for example. It takes a giant leap of faith to believe that we can do this--educate every youngster in the country with a college degree. We found that the average cost of an education in a State-supported university is $7,000 a year. So we simply increased the Pell grant to $7,000. The income criteria would remain as it is now. If you were wealthy or partially wealthy, you wouldn't get the full $7,000. But if you had an income of below a certain amount, you would get the $7,000. We left the two tax provisions that are in this bill that we just passed intact. Mr. President, I want you to look at this chart so that you can see what I am talking about and where we are headed. Here are the percentages of people in certain income categories. This is the highest level of income in the country --86 percent of those people go to college. In the next quintile down here, 60 percent, a little less than 60 percent, in 1983 and today, almost 68 percent of those kids go to college. And you get down here in the low-income, and look what happens. It started up--down and up. And now it is down again. If you look at the New York Times article of this past week, you will see that this figure is going to head down. Mr. President, I am not going to take up a lot of time to say something that everybody knows that we ought to be doing. But I do want to say this. Mr. President, the high school graduates in this country in the past 20 years have lost 18 percent more of their income. When you hear people say the income gap in this country is widening, there it is. High school students lost 18 percent in the last 20 years. Dropouts have lost 25 percent. And, if it continues at the present rate, by the year 2015 high school students will have lost 38 percent of their income because they didn't go to college. If you want to live in a civilized society, it is this simple. If you want to live in a civilized society, one that is relatively drug free and crime free, if you want to live in a society and in a technological age, we don't have any choice about it. This has to come. It is one of those things that we need to debate and debate now, and we need to do it. We need to make sure that no child in this country is denied a college education anymore than today we would deny somebody a high school education. So I forsook offering that amendment even though my staff and I had spent untold hours gathering statistics and information. I want to conclude as I opened a moment ago. Once again, I ask my brethren in the U.S. Senate and the people of America to ask yourself this one question: Do you think we are better off spending this $135 billion on a tax cut which goes to me, upper-income people, and $12 a year to the stiff out there making $15,000 a year--$12 a year for him? The guy making $15,000 a year gets $12 a year out of this tax bill. The guy making over $200,000 a year gets $3,500 to $3,700. It is ironic; it does not mean anything to either one of them. To the man making $15,000, $12 does not mean anything in his life; to a man making $200,000, $3,000, or $3,500 does not mean much either. That is what we are doing instead of meeting our obligation. Ask yourself which is more important, that tax cut or educating the children of this country so we can live in a civilized society. I thank the Chair. Mr. BURNS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, this amendment will prohibit the scoring of the sale of any lands from a national park or a national wildlife refuge or Forest Service lands. To my colleagues, I want to say, I have witnessed over the past 10 years an irresistible urge on the part of some of my colleagues to dispose of some of the national treasures of this country, even suggesting a commission to determine which lands, which national parks, we can do without and sell. This amendment is designed to do two things. No. 1, it is designed to discourage that by making it impossible to score the proceeds from a sale of national parks, Forest Service lands, or wildlife refuges in a reconciliation bill; and, No. 2, I want to say that I think it is a terrible practice. When I was Governor, I never allowed a one-time asset to be used in the budget. Finally, to those who would say, well, this will keep us from leasing ANWR, that is simply not true. You can lease ANWR. You can lease anything, wildlife refuge or otherwise, but you cannot use it as an asset in the reconciliation bill. I yield back such time as I may have.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I move to waive the Budget Act for Senate consideration of my amendment. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to Mrs. Merrill Catt, a speech therapist in the Weiner, AR, public school system and eight of her students who participated in a year-long project entitled ``The Rice Paddy Kids''. This project was designed to teach economics and provide hands-on learning experience to the students who ranged from third to eighth grade and were receiving speech/language therapy and resource services. Because the students live in the heart of the rice-producing region of Arkansas, which is the leading rice-producing State in the United States, the project focused on the production and marketing of rice. In the initial phase of the project the students gathered information and knowledge about rice and its economic impact locally and nationally. The second phase of the project consisted of hands-on learning opportunities as the students planned, advertised, and produced products containing rice and marketed their products to the student body and the community. In addition to the applications of economic concepts and basic skills contained in each phase, curriculum activities were incorporated to improve the students' individual language deficiencies. The students concluded the project by planning and implementing a rice banquet for their parents, business supporters, teachers, school administration and community members. What I've just summarized in several paragraphs takes many long hours of hard work and dedication to plan, organize, and implement. This is the second economic project Mrs. Catt has successfully undertaken to expand the knowledge and capabilities of her speech and language students, and I commend her for her initiative and willingness to go the extra mile for the benefit of her students and school. In addition to teaching these students about rice, she has shown them what can be accomplished when the important principles of responsibility, cooperation, perseverance, and innovation are utilized. I also congratulate the eight ``Rice Paddy Kids'' for a job well done. Not only are these students the benefactors of the project but they are an integral part of its success. While educating and helping themselves, they also educated and benefited their school and community. There are many school systems in Arkansas that are larger in terms of student population and funding than the Weiner school system. However, the accomplishments of Mrs. Catt and ``The Rice Paddy Kids'' are a perfect example of how bigger is not always better. They have demonstrated a principle in which I firmly believe: being from a small town is no excuse not to think big and achieve great things.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator for his courtesy.

Mr. BUMPERS. Could the managers of this bill tell us how many second- degree amendments there are to this process? I assume we are on the second-degree amendment process; is that correct?

Mr. BUMPERS. Then there are five, because I have one also. I am just wondering if we could get some kind of sequence so we know how they are going to be offered so we do not spend the rest of our lives waiting.

Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator from Delaware yield for an inquiry for a moment?

Mr. BUMPERS. Could the managers tell us how many second-degree amendments they anticipate on this?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may use.

Mr. BUMPERS. I yield 5 minutes to my coauthor of this amendment, Senator Gregg.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have never heard so many stale arguments in my life. This is like saying we will give General Motors the steel to build cars if they will hire some people to do it. This is a simple question of giving the biggest mining companies in the world the taxpayer's resources. That is who we are talking about. This doesn't belong to the 10 Senators from the Western States. This gold and silver belongs to the taxpayers--the people I have heard talk about so many times on this tax bill, that ``we are going to give a tax cut to the long-suffering taxpayers'' and, at the same time, give away billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium that belongs to the taxpayers. This amendment has nothing to do with the gold companies' depletion, even on private lands. It has nothing to do with depletion on State lands. It has to do with the lands they got from the U.S. Government for nothing. And we are paying them to take it. We are giving them a depletion allowance to mine gold that we gave them. There is a lot more mining that goes on on private and State lands than goes on on Federal lands. They are not going offshore. They are not going broke. Here is the big ad by Barrick Mining Co. in the Mining World News: ``Developing Your Gold Property to its Full Potential.'' Work with a new partner, Barrick Gold. You may not have dealt with us before, but you should know we are the world's most profitable gold producer. And well they should be; they don't pay anything for it. This means $400 million to the taxpayers of this country over the next 5 years. They are perfectly willing to pay an 18 percent royalty on private lands. They are perfectly willing to pay 5 to 18 percent on State lands. They pay severance taxes, reclamation fees, and royalties to everybody under the shining Sun--except the taxpayers of the United States, who own it. Let me say to my colleagues. Each one of you who are defending this proposition, let me ask you this: You go home and tell your friends, your supporters--I am not talking about the mining companies, I am talking about the taxpayers--I want you to tell the people back home that if you had 500 acres of land and had $18 billion or $11 billion worth of gold under it--or in the case of Stillwater Mining Co. in Montana, $38 billion worth of palladium and platinum on 2,000 acres--if you owned it, and I came to you and I said that I am going to relieve you of all these billions of dollars worth of gold, I will get rid of it for you, what would you pay me? We can't pay you for it. We are just going to get rid of the gold for you. You would say, get thee hence to the nearest psychiatrist for a saliva test. I cannot believe that, year after year, we listen to these stale arguments about how people are going offshore, and they create jobs. So does some small struggling businessman that hires 10 people in your State, but you don't give him all of his resources to produce something with. Mr. President, it is time that this body stood up to its duty. This is not about the mining law. This is simply saying, in those narrow cases, where we gave them the land, and they are mining it and not paying a dime to the taxpayers of this country in any kind of a fee, we are saying, for God's sake, let's not pay them to take it. At least take the depletion allowance from them. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Akaka and Senator Feingold be added as cosponsors of the amendment.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, this is the ninth year I have stood on this floor and tried to prick the conscience of the Members of this body about this last remaining egregious scam on the American people. Next year, when some of you are up for reelection, I expect you are going to see some 30-second spots on this. What is it your opponent will say? What is it that makes you want to give away billions and billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money and us get nothing in return? Why do you tell your Chamber of Commerce you will handle their money like it was your own? Anybody in this body would be disqualified from being a Senator if he answered the question I posed a moment ago, ``Yes, I will let them come and take gold off my property for nothing.'' Why, of course, you would not. This is a very narrowly drafted amendment. It is crafted not to discriminate. It simply says that if you mine gold on private lands, fine, get a depletion. Oil companies, coal companies, and gas companies are entitled to a depletion. But when you give resources of the U.S. taxpayers away for nothing, and then allow them to take a 15 percent depletion, which is worth $400 million of the taxpayers' money, and you turn around here in this tax bill and say we are going to give it back to you, don't give it away in the first place. For God's sake, colleagues, do your duty. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. The distinguished floor manager is just suggesting to proceed as we were with the understanding there be 20 minutes equally divided tomorrow morning on this amendment. That is essentially my unanimous consent request.

Mr. BUMPERS. Let them speak as long as they want with the understanding we will have a 20-minute time agreement equally divided tomorrow morning. I make that request.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, this is the 9th consecutive year that I have tried my very best to do justice to the taxpayers of the United States. I have heard an awful lot of talk in the last 60 days by people on both sides of the aisle about the $135 billion in tax cuts for those long-suffering taxpayers. I do not intend to debate the merits of the tax cuts tonight. What I want to debate is the cynicism, the contradiction, the hypocrisy of talking about doing justice to the taxpayers on one hand by giving them a massive tax cut, and at the same time allow the biggest mining companies in the world to take billions of dollars worth of gold off land that belongs to the taxpayers of the United States and not pay one red cent for the privilege and then turn around and give these same mining companies an enormous tax break which they never did anything to deserve. In 1872, Ulysses Grant signed the famous mining law of 1872 that encouraged people to go West and stake 20-acre claims. The 1872 mining law is still firmly intact. There are now over 330,000 claims that have been legitimately filed that belong to people who went out and simply drove 4 stakes in the ground every 20 acres and then went down to the courthouse and filed their claim. In addition, there are approximately 650 applications that have been filed with the Bureau of Land Management for patents on some of those claims which would permit the applicants to buy the land for $2.50 or $5 an acre. The people in the Senate do not pay much attention to this issue. They apparently pay little attention to the people watching C-SPAN because they are the ones who are getting the shaft. Madam President, can you imagine this scenario. Newmont Mining Co., one of the biggest mining companies in the world, has a gold mine in Nevada. They pay the owners of the land on which that gold mine is situated an 18 percent gross royalty for the gold they take off that land. However, when they mine on public, taxpayer-owned land, they do not pay one red cent to the taxpayers of this country. And you wonder why the people of this country are cynical. You wonder why the words ``corporate welfare'' were used so generously around here when we were looking for offsets for this massive tax cut, and this bill comes back to us from the Finance Committee with not a word about corporate welfare. Do you know what else these mining companies do? They find somebody that has a bunch of claims that they think have some potential, and they buy the claims and then they mine it. Then they go to the Bureau of Land Management and say, ``We have commercial gold or silver on this land and we want to buy it, and we will give you the princely sum of either $2.50 an acre or $5 an acre.'' Do you know what Bruce Babbitt, the Secretary of Interior, has to do? He has to, by law, give them a deed to that land. Here is what has happened just in the past several years. Barrick Gold Co. paid the U.S. taxpayers $9,000. Do you know what they got for that? They got almost 2,000 acres in Nevada with 11 billion dollars worth of gold on it. It belongs to the taxpayers of the United States. Do you know what the taxpayers are going to get for that $11 billion? Zip, zero, nothing. No royalty, no severance tax, no reclamation fee, and then they take a 15 percent depletion allowance on the gold they take out. We not only give it to them for $2.50 an acre or $5 an acre, we give them a depletion allowance for mining what they never paid for. In 1995, Faxe Kalk, a Danish company, bought land in Idaho containing 1 billion dollars' worth of travertine. Do you know what they paid the taxpayers of the United States for this land containing the $1 billion in minerals? They paid $275. There is an application pending at the Bureau of Land Management right now by the Stillwater Mining Co. for about 2,000 acres of Forest Service land in Montana. Stillwater will pay a maximum of $10,000 for that land. What do you think lies under that 2,000 acres of land? This is their figure, not mine: 38 billion dollars worth of palladium and platinum--$38 billion. Do you know who that belongs to? It belongs to the taxpayers of the United States. Do you know what the taxpayers of the United States are going to get in exchange for their $38 billion? You guessed it--the shaft. Nothing, not a penny. And people stand up and defend this thing as though it is some kind of a righteous cause. These mining companies do not mind paying private property owners a royalty. They pay the States a royalty when they mine on State lands. They also pay the states a severance tax. It is only when the land belongs to the taxpayers of the United States that they object. When you hear people in the coffee shops in your hometown talk about Government being sold off to the highest bidder, you cannot find a better case of it. The Halls of Congress and the Senate office buildings have been so full of lobbyists since I announced I was going to try to do away with the depletion allowance for companies mining on public land, you could not stir them with a stick. I can hardly get down the hall from my office because the Finance Committee office is between my office and the elevator. So what I am saying, Madam President, let's at least have the courage to tell the taxpayers of this country that we are not going to give the mining companies, after we give them lands for $5 an acre, a 15 percent depletion allowance to mine minerals they never paid for. When the oil companies buy a lease in the ocean, when the coal companies buy a lease on lands in the West, when the natural gas companies explore for gas on Federal lands, any time they find it, they pay a royalty for the interest in the minerals. They take a depletion allowance and they are entitled to a depletion allowance because, by definition, if you are depleting a capital asset, that is a legitimate thing to do when you paid for it in the first place. The oil and gas companies deplete oil and gas, and they have a right to do it. They paid a handsome price for it, and they are depleting an asset they paid for. These people paid nothing. What have the taxpayers gotten out of this besides not 1 red cent in royalties? Well, for openers, they have gotten 557,000 abandoned mine sites, 57 of which are on the Superfund list. The Mineral Policy Center says that the estimated cost of cleaning up the mess that these mining companies have left us is between $31 billion and $72 billion. I hate to be repetitive, but just to emphasize the point, let me go through it again. The mining companies give the taxpayers $5 an acre for gold. They take billions of dollars worth of gold off the land. They pay the taxpayers no royalty at all, they get a 15 percent depletion allowance; and then they leave an unmitigated environmental disaster, which is going to cost the taxpayers of this Nation between $31 billion and $72 billion to clean up. Madam President, I have announced that I would not seek reelection, and in deliberating on that decision, I got to thinking about debates, what would be debated, what would be said, who would say it, and how would you respond. And I thought, how would you respond to an accusation that you voted for allowing the gold and silver and palladium and platinum mining companies to continue raping and pillaging the taxpayers of this country--all the time you are talking about a big tax cut for the taxpayers because they deserve it? And how are you going to pay for the tax cut? You are going to pay for the lion's share of it by cutting Medicare by $115 billion. You can put any face on it you want. I didn't vote for it. I have no intention of voting for it. Take $115 billion off Medicare and that, in turn, will come off of services for the elderly, part of the most vulnerable in our society, and then you ask your opponent, did you vote for that? Yes, I voted for that. Well, this $115 billion that you cut in Medicare, what did you do with it? We gave it away in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America. You didn't put it on the deficit? No, we didn't put it on the deficit. You are going to balance the budget by cutting taxes? Isn't that the same old line you gave us back in 1981 that gave us a $5.3 trillion debt? Then what if somebody said, how about those mining companies? I have heard Senator Bumpers, and I have read in the paper some of the things he said--for 9 years--about how the mining companies take billions of dollars worth of gold off of what is or was Federal lands, and they pay nothing for it, isn't that true? It is true. Nobody will deny it. And they don't pay 1 red cent. It gives corporate welfare a bad name. The Western Senators, which have gold mines in their States on Federal lands, ask what if you bought a mining claim from some nester that staked out 500 acres, and the mining companies pay him handsomely for it, aren't they entitled to a depletion? Now, that is a neat way to avoid the issue. It also makes this point. When you buy 500-acre claims, for example, from some old nester that has been sitting on them for 10 years, they not only pay him a handsome price for it, they pay him a royalty, or what we call residual, an override. Now, they are willing to pay State's royalties, they are willing to pay private owner's royalties, and when they buy this land from some old nester that staked it 10 or 20 years ago, they are willing to pay him a royalty. It is only if the words ``U.S.'' are on it anyplace that they don't want to pay a penny in royalty. The questions I ask every year, and the questions that never get answered, are: Why are you willing to do this to the taxpayers? Why are you willing to pay a royalty of 18 percent on private lands in Nevada? Why are you willing to pay an average of 5 percent on all private lands in the United States? Why are you willing to pay the States a severance tax? Why are you willing to pay the States a royalty on their lands? But when it comes to lands that belong to the taxpayers of the United States, you are not willing to pay 1 red cent? Everybody falls silent when you pose those questions. (Mr. BROWNBACK assumed the Chair.)